I’ll take 14 billion doses, please

China says that it's going to be inoculating all of its farm birds against the …

As covered in the BBC and New York Times (and other places, I'm sure), China's announced that it's going to inoculate all of its domestic poultry against the avian flu. Just how big a project is this? It's estimated that China has approximately 5.2 billion birds in cultivation at any one time. But poultry have a higher turnover rate than most other domestic animals, so the estimated yearly population works out to be in the area of 14 billion. Even with the estimated cost of US$0.10 to produce the vaccination, that leaves the program costing US$1.4 billion a year before even considering the transport and staff. China's vaccine production capacity appears to be sufficient, however, at an estimated 100 million doses per day.

Beyond simply the cost, the organizational issues appear to be staggering. Poultry, more than any other domestic animal, tends to be raised in an ad-hoc manner by the general populace. Just getting the vaccine in the hands of qualified people in all the small villages of China seems like an impossibility. Getting repeated doses everywhere to handle the turnover of bird stocks is simply laughable. Then there's the fact that there's a large supply of very mobile nondomesticated birds that will provide a reservoir for the virus and possibly allow it to mutate around the vaccines.

So, in short, the program appears to be destined for limited success, at best. Why pursue and announce it at all? The program may be effective at industrial-scale farms, where the cost of slaughtering the entire bird stock would outweigh the cost of the vaccination program. The announcement of the program, however, may really be PR aimed at different audiences. Plans for slowing the spread of a pandemic generally involve a reduction in international traffic, something that would severely damage China's export economy. Reducing fear of transit links to China could be one plus to come out of this. China's leaders are also dedicated to keeping its population convinced that centralized control is necessary for the indefinite future, and this is a situation where they can point to this sort of control as being the only way to implement such a program. These two factors combined with some limited positive benefits may make the whole thing worth the cost.